On Starting Over

Starting over sounds dramatic until you're actually in it. Then it just feels like yet another day.

You wake up, make the coffee, sit with the fact that something is different now - a job, a relationship, a version of yourself you thought you'd be by now - and life continues around you completely unbothered. The traffic still moves. The neighbour's kid still cries at 7am. The world has no idea that everything feels different inside your chest.

That's the strange thing about starting over. You expect it to feel like a clean page. Instead it feels like the same page, with some words crossed out.

But here's what I've come to understand about it. Starting over is never really starting from zero. You're starting from everything you've already lived through - the mistakes that taught you something, the relationships that shaped you, the version of yourself that didn't work out and quietly showed you why. That's not nothing. That's actually everything.

The world doesn't pause for your starting over. Which is frustrating at first and then, eventually, quietly reassuring. Life moving on around you is its own kind of permission to move with it.

You're not behind. You just know more now than you did then. And that changes everything.